Honest question: has this ever been common? All the cases you list are “king” of their time and place.
I thought you were going to point out that adultery was the classical way of having multiple partners...
JoachimSchipper
Karma: 741
I’m confused—you seem to take it as a given that PUA techniques are the only/best tool for pursuing the many forms of relationship mentioned in the article. I’m by no means an expert, but I’d be surprised if PUA worked as well for, say, a woman trying to extend her list of partners with a man with a shared interest in classical music. (Quickly glancing at some lists, “get out there and meet people” seems to be good advice; but quickly approaching lots of partners may not work well in this case.)
Isn’t it possible that the broader scope of this article justifies de-emphasizing pickup artistry? Even if you don’t think that PUA should be avoided for its mind-killing properties, shouldn’t we at least give lukeprog the benefit of the doubt? If nothing else, there may be follow-up articles dealing with this.
There is already basically no punishment for breaking the contract that is marriage; just social pressure. Do you really think that keeping the agreement secret is desirable?
(Although I guess that ”… till death do us part. Also, we will engage in 4b8cfc115af495125c084f26210ab91158f1ed34 if either spouse wants to” may work. Note that there are downsides to using a hash, like your friends trying out a few (in)appropriate words… but this is not a discussion of appropriate cryptographic techniques.)
Another proof that survey design is hard: should I answer “yay male/male sex, I strongly support same-sex ” or “boo male/male sex, I am not interested?” Or, taking a page from Alicorn’s book, what about those who say “yay male/male sex, I’d like to be interested in men?” (I’d expect this to be a statistically detectable portion of test-takers.)
Also, making people write essays just to throw them away is not a terribly productive use of anyone’s time.
This is rather self-serving: the Stoics in general were renowned (and well-paid) teachers. (More practically, I’ve seen some articles suggesting that, in the US, the cost of some majors now outweighs the monetary benefits. The cost of education should at least be considered.)
Note that it is possible for newcomers to hold the same inaccurate beliefs as their predecessors while the core improves its knowledge or expands in size. In fact, as LW grows it will have to recruit from, say, Hacker News (where I first heard of LW) instead of Singularity lists, producing newcomers less in tune with the local truth.
(Unnamed’s comment shows interesting differences in opinion between a “core” and the rest, but (s)he seems to have skipped the only question with an easily-verified answer, i.e. Newton.)
I think that’s mostly correct, but Eliezer means something stronger than “considerable disutility” when he says “right” (e.g. self-modifying to like killing people and then killing people is not right; The meaning of right.)
Not everyone agrees with Eliezer on everything; this is usually not that explicit, but consider e.g. the number of people talking about relationships vs. the number of people talking about cryonics or FAI—LW doesn’t act, collectively, as if it really believes Eliezer is right. It does assume that there is no God/god/supernatural, though.
(Also, where does this idea of atheists hating God come from? Most atheists have better things to do than hang on /r/atheism!)
More sex does not have to mean more casual sex. There are lots of people in committed relationships (marriages) that would like to have more-similar sex drives. Nuns wouldn’t want their libido increased, but it’s not only for the benefit of the “playahs” either.
Also, I think the highest-voted comment (“I don’t think that any relationship style is the best (...) However, I do wish that people were more aware of the possibility of polyamory (...)”) is closer to the consensus than something like “everyone should have as many partners as much as possible”. LW does assume that polyamory and casual sex is optional-but-ok, though.
Put a phonebook on your chair, with a cushion on top if you think that’s more comfortable? It’s good enough to experiment. You may want to spend some actual money eventually.
It does suggest that the “newest comment” section is sufficient to sustain a discussion.
A possible argument: rituals will help build a cohesive tribe, but harm recruiting efforts. LW is more valuable for its articles than for its community, so tribe-building is not that valuable. But there are lots of people who are not yet aware of LW’s ideas/community who would be turned off by cultishness.
(I don’t feel qualified to have a position on this issue myself.)
Do you think you could make a hundred predictions like “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality will be updated this year” or “The Winds of Winter will not be released this year” and only be wrong once? Maybe you’re right, but your confidence seems high to me. (Note that 98% resp. 96% allows you two resp. four errors.)
A bit off topic, but you seem to be doing this kind of thing a lot: is there any trick for calibrating high-/low-probability events? I can see how to figure out whether my 50% is 50% or 40%, but I’d need to make a lot of predictions to get a statistically useful number of 1% predictions wrong, even if my 1% is really 2% (a serious error!)
I put some text from recent comments by both AspiringKnitter and Will_Newsome into I write like; it suggested that AspiringKnitter writes “like” Arthur Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey and other books) while Will_Newsome writes “like” Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita and other books). I’ve never read either, but it does look like a convenient textual comparison doesn’t trivially point to them being the same.
Also, if AspiringKnitter is a sockpuppet, it’s at least an interesting one.
Looks like you are right. Two of my (larger, to give the algorithm more to work with) texts from other sources gave Cory Doctorow (technical piece) and again Lovecraft (a Hacker News comment about drug dogs?)
Sorry, and thanks for the correction.
Your comment was hard to read, asserts-but-does-not-argue that days are the “natural” interpretation (“Schelling point”), tells us to “trust the augur” without any real-world or in-universe data showing that augurs are better than horoscopes, contains “I approve of your trolling” and goes against local verities and tastes. Lightning hitting the C is surprising, but there is a simpler explanation for that (see Alejandro1′s reply.) There are quite a few reasons not to upvote you.
Some loose thoughts:
Use the word “illegal” more often. Most countries in the world, including the US, take a very dim view of marijuana. I think the Dutch drug policy is better, but getting caught may have serious consequences which should be thoroughly considered.
A high-quality mediator (“confessor”) and illegal drugs (which implies quite a bit of preparation) are nontrivial resources. You also have to instruct the group. Wouldn’t it be more fair to compare the effectiveness of your scheme to, say, a group with a high-powered brainstorm consultant (in addition to an “unaided” group)?
Are high-quality mediators useful in unaided groups? They are not common, at least. If they make the group less effective, is the extra creativity worth enough to overcome the bad effects?
I thought LSD was used in this way more often than marijuana?
More generally, are legal(-ish) substances able to deliver the same effect, if any?
Are you proposing that marijuana will help rationalist groups, or all groups? In the first case, define “rationalist”.
Full disclosure: I’m Dutch, and I think mind-altering chemicals are squicky.
P.S. I don’t understand your reddit link. Your last two links are broken. Check the rest.
EDITed to add: note that this article previously appeared in discussion, which I didn’t know. Consider reading fiddlemath’s comment and other comments.)
Dennett argues that human consciousness is essentially a single-threaded program laboriously constructed to run on an essentially parallel machine (“Consciousness explained”; I’m unfortunately still reading.)
We can, I believe, access the underlying machine. Processing social cues (cf. autists), playing Quake or protein folding is too hard for our single-threaded conscious brains, but clearly within human capacity. From personal experience, many high-level mathematicians (professors etc.) also have highly effective intuitions (of course, the ideas still have to be checked by the conscious mind—even highly effective intuitions produce quite a bit of nonsense, and almost always forget some details.)
I took it as well. One comment: my mother and father adhere(d) to different flavours of Christianity in different degrees. This made it somewhat hard to answer that question fully (I went with my father because he cares most, but my mother’s views probably had more influence on me.)